From John Athanasiou
By arguing that life can create itself given sufficient time, Erik Foxcroft is confusing a quantitative change with a qualitative one (2 April, p 29). Reducing the intelligent input to the attempts to synthesise life would indeed increase the time required for success, but intelligent input cannot be removed altogether without introducing a qualitative change. This thought experiment is therefore a false argument. It involves a discontinuity in the logic at the point where the intelligent agent is removed, so the scientific model and the point he was attempting to make are both lost. What is left is a theory that depends on the unsupported assumption that life can arise without intelligent input.
A further difficulty with this idea is that it ignores the evidence that life, on certain levels, is irreducibly complex, as noted by Michael J. Behe in Darwin’s Black Box and A. E. Wilder-Smith in The scientific alternative to neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.
The previous week Matt Whiteley, writing on the same topic, argued that the researchers attempting to create life are trying to reproduce an event that took place over hundreds of millions of years (26 March, p 31). Does he mean that the first living organism was hundreds of millions of years in the making, or that after a suitably large number of unsuccessful attempts during those hundreds of million years it finally succeeded?
Whiteley is appealing not to science but to probability. Postulate infinite time and the probability of any event is unity, in other words, it is certain. Allow a long enough time and unlikely events become proportionally more likely. The problem is that the laws of probability apply only to events that are possible, and nobody knows for sure that abiogenesis – the production of living organisms from non-living matter – is possible. It must be assumed that it is before turning to probability, and the assumption must be declared if the labels “science” and “reason” are not to be misused.
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From John Hastings
People who believe in a “Creator” do not come to that belief unless they have evidence in which they have confidence, although it will not be “scientific” evidence. Science tests theory by experiment and observation, but these methods cannot be applied to the question of a creator. The essence of experiment is control of all conditions. Clearly one cannot expect to be able to control a supernatural creator. Observational evidence would have to be of some supernatural event involving suspension of at least one natural law – in other words, a miracle. Such events could not be a regular or predictable occurrence or they would be considered a manifestation of a natural law.
A comprehensive programme of systematic observation scarcely seems feasible, but there have been studies which indicate that religious belief and/or prayer have a positive effect on health. Otherwise we have to rely on chance eyewitness accounts or historical records of miracles. For the Christian, the defining miracle is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, UK
This correspondence is now closed-Ed
Tilbury, Essex, UK
